


A Truth Never Realised

by Oakwyrm



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anxiety, Character Study, Elias Bouchard Being a Bastard, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, It's 3 am, It/Its Pronouns For Michael | The Distortion (The Magnus Archives), M/M, Michael Shelley has Low Self-Esteem, No beta we die like archival assistants, Possession, Post-Break Up, god tagging for og elias and jonalias is a NIGHTMARE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:27:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26054176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oakwyrm/pseuds/Oakwyrm
Summary: The thing about having crippling anxiety and the self-worth of a common garden snail is that when your boyfriend breaks up with you out of the blue it just feels like the inevitable finally happened.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Michael Shelley, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Original Elias Bouchard/Michael Shelley
Comments: 16
Kudos: 71





	A Truth Never Realised

**Author's Note:**

> What do you mean I have to create the content I want to see in the world?

There were a lot of things Michael Shelley never noticed. So naive, so trusting, so desperate to please. There were many things Michael Shelley had known, in the way one knows a comforting lie to be the truth. Gertrude Robinson was just the sweetest old lady he had ever met. Eric Delano had quit and decided that keeping in touch with the people who worked at a job he despised wasn’t worth the emotional labour. Emma Harvey was just a co-worker.

Whatever supernatural forces existed within the world, their appearances were few and far between.

Elias Bouchard had just had enough of him one day.

There was nothing supernatural about it. What did it matter that over the course of a single week Elias had gone from unmotivated though competent enough to avoid being fired to the very image of the immaculate professional? An unexpected promotion could do that to a person. What did it matter that Gertrude seemed so displeased? She was just not used to Elias being her boss yet. It probably felt odd to have a boss so much younger than oneself, anyway.

And alright so maybe in the right lighting Elias’ eyes now looked blue instead of the hazel Michael had become so familiar with, but it hardly mattered. It wasn’t like Michael had many opportunities to see them up close anymore. He hadn’t since the day Elias had gotten his promotion.

A small part of Michael wanted to blame that. Wanted to think Elias had gotten a taste of success and decided he no longer needed Michael. He wanted, so badly some days, to lay the blame solely at Elias’ feet.

But that wasn’t fair.

Elias had come from money. He was a trust-fund brat who had grown disillusioned by capitalism while at university. Michael had too many memories of lounging about in Elias’ shitty, run-down flat discussing the failings of their current economic system and what it might hypothetically be replaced with to believe Elias capable of that particular one-eighty.

The only answer left to him, then, was the one he knew in his heart to be true. Elias had grown tired of him. He had been very polite about it. Too polite. Professional, distant. It had felt less like a breakup and more like a business meeting.

That had only served to drive the point home further.

Michael had known it was coming, of course. The nagging, horrid little voice in the back of his head never actually went away. Elias had tried to assure him he didn’t have to worry but, well. He’d been wrong. Not that Michael blamed him. It had been a kind lie while it lasted.

The thing about having crippling anxiety coupled with the self-worth of a common garden snail was that it was extraordinarily easy to dismiss any odd actions from those around him as entirely his fault. He had done something wrong, and Elias had finally noticed that he was more trouble than he was worth.

Despite the inevitability of it, it still hurt.

So Michael kept his head down. He interacted with Elias as little as possible, a remarkably easy task all things considered. Elias didn’t seem particularly keen on seeing him, either. That stung, too, but it was probably for the best.

It was also, unfortunately, hard to move on. Impossible, really. They may not have seen much of each other, but Elias’ presence seemed to sink into the very foundations of the Institute, too deep to ever be uprooted. There was nowhere within its walls that was truly free of his presence, and Michael’s heart had always been weak.

If he’d had friends outside of it they would have told him to quit.

He wouldn’t have been able to explain why he couldn’t.

The first and only time Michael met Peter Lukas, he couldn’t help the way he catalogued the man.

There might have been a rugged charm to him if he hadn’t seemed so distant. Michael could nearly feel the cold rolling off of him in waves, warding away any who might try to approach him. He still carried the faint smell of salty sea air about him, so very out of place in the proper, academic setting of the Institute.

Truth be told, Michael might have overlooked him entirely. Had Elias not walked over to him briskly and pulled him aside, his hand lingering on Peter’s arm in a way which spoke of far more than just a relationship between the Head of an academic institute and one of its most generous donors.

And all of a sudden, Michael could not _stop_ noticing Peter. He was older, and unlike Michael, he’d seen great success in his attempts to grow a beard. He held himself with a quiet sort of confidence. Every inch the captain even on land. Michael wasn’t quite sure how he was so sure that Peter was a captain. Perhaps it came down to the fact that a man like Peter Lukas could never _just_ be a sailor. He was far more interesting than an almost broke archival assistant, either way. Not taller, though, that Michael could at least claim.

But Elias had never looked at Michael how he looked at Peter, and for the first time, Michael found himself grateful for that fact.

He turned sharply and headed back down into the archives before he could think too hard about why the look in Elias’ eyes had seemed so off.

So, no, Michael Shelley never learned the true fate of Elias Bouchard.

Yet the Distortion despised the Watcher.

Michael Shelley thought of Elias is his last moments. No grand revelation came to him in the midst of his unbecoming. No puzzle pieces clicked into place. That was not the nature of the thing with which he was already so deeply entangled.

It was regret, pure and simple.

The thing that was and was not Michael knew the truth, and that hurt.

It was not supposed to know truths, that was not its purview.

He couldn’t believe he’d been so blind.

The irony of it shook a laugh like audio feedback from something which was not a throat.

The Distortion had never known regret. It did not know what to do with love. The relentless, scurrying, spiralling panic of anxiety may have amused it had the memories not been too painful to hold yet impossible to sever.

It knew hate.

Hate was easy.

It hated the Archivist.

For disrupting-

For abandoning-

For creating.

The pain that should never have been was her doing. She had left it. She had thrown a wrench in its works. Both and neither and it despised her for all of it.

It hated the Institute. A place of _knowledge_ and _questions_ where secrets went to die and twisting shapes were pinned in place and scrutinized. Not its antithesis, because that would imply it had a thesis, to begin with, but close enough.

It was not hard to layer a hatred for the Watcher onto that.

The names Jonah Magnus and Elias Bouchard meant little to it. Names were not real, and they did not matter.

Michael Shelley had cared for the Watcher’s puppet. The Distortion that ate Michael and was eaten in turn did not know if it would have felt the same. It did not know if he would have hated the Watcher as it did. It did not know if he would have felt anger towards the Archivist as it did. It did not want to know.

Its existence had been so simple before Michael. Before becoming and unbecoming, all at once. Thoughts, so concrete and real, were new. Some shard of a human instinct it should not have tried to force them to walk a straight path, not to spiral away into endless unknowable, maddening fractals.

It was wrong, and it hurt.

It was angry, and it hated.

And beneath it all, it grieved, though it would not have had the words to describe such emotion even if it had cared to.

**Author's Note:**

> Fell into extreme rarepair hell and had to do something about it so here we are.


End file.
